Payment card networks receive transaction data from millions of merchants worldwide and need to ensure the continuity of merchant information over time in order to maintain the reliability of such data. This can be a difficult task, in that merchant continuity, or continuous proper identification of a merchant associated with payment card transaction data, is often damaged when merchants change acquirers, upgrade terminals, or move locations. Various so-called cleansing routines are commonly used by most payment card networks to address this issue. While many such cleansing routines are known in the art, they are computationally intensive and inefficient, and focus primarily on differences in the various name, location and other data associated with the merchants in order to identify changes in merchant information that disrupt the continuity of transaction data acquired for a particular merchant. None to date has exploited the linkage data inherent in cardholder loyalty to address this continuity of merchant data issue.
There is a continuing need in the art for methods of ensuring continuity of transaction data for merchants participating in a payment card network.